How Ruby is your Ruby? As we've found our way to Ruby, we've all brought with us habits and idioms from the languages we know and love (or hate). Sometimes, these habits serve us well, and other times, they make our lives more difficult. More often, they make life difficult for our collaborators, who don't expect to see C, Java, or PHP in their Ruby codebase. Not only that, as many new Rubyists have found their way to Ruby from Rails, they've brought along various Rails-isms, some of which aren't even a good idea in Rails-land (callbacks, anyone?), or dependencies on libraries like ActiveSupport which are overkill for their real needs. We'll talk about some of the baggage we bring to our Ruby code, and some simple techniques that will help us leave it behind.